Want to Make Budget Cuts? Start Here

By William D. Hartung

March 17, 2017

The Trump administration on Thursday provided an outline of its first budget, a proposal that will dramatically reshape how the United States spends money on national security and defense. There is no question that the United States’ security spending patterns need to be rebalanced to better address urgent security challenges. The Trump budget will not do that.

The new budget will involve unprecedented cuts in foreign aid, an essential tool that currently accounts for less than 1 percent of the federal budget. The administration’s proposal to cut the State Department’s budget by 28 percent is even more troubling. The department is already woefully under-resourced, with a $50 billion budget compared with the Pentagon’s roughly $600 billion in annual expenditures.

The cuts at the State Department will fall particularly heavily on American support for United Nations aid programs, including lifesaving refugee assistance efforts that are desperate for funding in light of the humanitarian catastrophes in Syria, Yemen and South Sudan.

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U.S. Army trainers working with an Iraqi recruit in Taji, Iraq, in 2015.CreditJohn Moore/Getty Images

Ex-military men within the Trump administration, like Secretary of Defense James Mattis, should push back against the White House’s plan. When he headed the Central Command, Mr. Mattis testified to Congress that if the State Department budget was cut, “I’m going to need more ammunition.” In other words, if we don’t have skilled diplomats in place to help prevent or mitigate conflicts, it will mean an even larger burden on our military, which has already suffered greatly from the ill-advised wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (The new budget does propose more ammunition — in the form of increased spending on troops and big-ticket items like aircraft carriers, missile-defense systems and nuclear weapons.)

If President Trump really feels the need to cut foreign aid, he should take a close look at the Pentagon’s “shadow” security assistance programs — programs that are buried deep in the department’s budget, where they are largely shielded from scrutiny by the news media, the public and most members of Congress.

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Pentagon has created dozens of new arms and training programs within its own budget, at a cost of about $10 billion per year, in support of activities in more than 130 countries, according to the Security Assistance Monitor. This is small change by Pentagon standards, but more than three times the value of the domestic programs that are on the White House’s “hit list,” including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, and funding for Planned Parenthood, Legal Services, AmeriCorps and the Export-Import Bank.

This is more than an issue of simple budget trade-offs. The truth is, Pentagon arms and training programs often do more harm than good. Over $500 million has gone to programs aimed at arming and training Syrian rebels that have essentially collapsed, with the unintended consequence of having United States-supplied arms fall into the hands of the Islamic State via the black market. In Yemen, $500 million in American weapons went missing in the middle of that country’s civil war and are believed to now be in the hands of either Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula or the Houthi rebels.

In the most infamous example, despite $25 billion in arms and training over many years, the Iraqi military evaporated in the face of attacks by the Islamic State, leaving behind large quantities of United States-supplied vehicles, guns and ammunition that have since been put to use by the jihadists in Iraq and Syria.

Boosters of these Pentagon aid programs might argue that the examples mentioned above, as disastrous as they are, are exceptions. But there are few examples of effective security assistance programs to point to. And if the administration is looking to make cuts at the State Department, it could begin with the hundreds of millions of dollars in security aid that the United States supplies each year to Egypt, much of which ends up in the pockets of corrupt military officials.

As the Congressional Research Service noted in 2015 after carefully reviewing the Pentagon’s rapidly proliferating military aid programs, “the assumption that building foreign security forces will have tangible U.S. national security benefits remains a largely untested proposition.”

If President Trump wants to trim the foreign-aid budget, he should start with these arms and training programs. It is a policy that isolationists, fiscal conservatives and advocates of robust diplomacy should all be able to agree on.

William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy.